#2 The Associates (Affiliate) Program

You can complain about the low commissions all you want, but I love this program. I have never been an affiliate for any other company where people buy so many products in addition to what you promote.

That’s a testament to Amazon’s great upselling and the overall brand trust.

They even pay you when people sign up for Amazon’s free trials.

The only thing I don’t like is that they have a 24 hour cookie. That means if someone buys 24 hours after using your affiliate link, you don’t get the commission. So I guess that’s a trade off for the multiple product commissions per order.

You definitely need traffic in order to make worthwhile money. My last check was for over $500, and I had to generate over 10,000 clicks to the site.

#3 Amazon CPM

There were hardly any ads relevant to my content, and that’s a killer for advertising.

Also, if your traffic is very low, don’t bother. It would take you way too long to earn a worthwhile amount.

It’s very similar to AdSense where you paste code into your site and they display ads. You choose how much you want to earn for every 1,000 impressions, or you can let Amazon suggest the amount for you to optimize your earnings.

#4 Amazon Video Direct

Did you know you can get paid for uploading videos to Amazon? Much like the YouTube partner program, you earn money for video views (or streaming in this case).

The one thing to keep in mind is that people search Amazon a lot differently than they search YouTube. So the same kind of content that performs well on YouTube might not perform as well on Amazon.

They seem to market the program for episodic content, but you can upload almost anything you want.

Your videos must have a closed caption script or they won’t be approved. You can use a service like Rev to create the file. Others have figured out a way to use their YouTube captions for the service as well.

You’ve got to love the fact that the Internet provides us the opportunity to sell shirts without even having to handle inventory. Sure, you sacrifice bigger profits compared to selling them directly, but it’s worth it for the convenience.

I’m not interested in running a full-blown T-shirt business, and these kinds of services are PERFECT for people like me — and probably many of you too.

Right now, Merch is an invitation-only program and unfortunately it can take months before they get to your submission. I’ve heard some say it took over a year to get in. Yikes! 🙁

I even included a link to my Spreadshirt store to display my art when I applied, hoping that would speed up the process. I figured it would have little impact, but a girl can try, right?

Thank you so much, Lisa! You always provide great information. I’ve started to seriously dive into the world of internet marketing, and I love it! You’ve really helped motivate me to try building out niche websites and helped give me ideas to go back to my old blog to optimise things better.

I’m currently only doing amazon affiliate links, but definitely going to get into FBA in the future. I think for now, I’ll just concentrate this. 🙂

Hello Lisa,
First of all thank you so much for teaching us about online websites and how to earn money out of it. Lisa, as ablocker use is increasing day by day, do you have any suggestions to deal with it?
I have also seen people using don’t know any kind of plugin or what like they put a pop up to disable adblock then only u can see content.

Adblock is also my concern. Lots of people are using this tool or other similar tools to avoid the ads. Consequently, we cannot earn much money.
I wonder if there are any ways to unlock those ‘adblocks’ from the blog and other pages having videos.
Could you please share with us, Lisa?

Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about adblock. It’s only going to get more popular as people get sick of ads. Blocking ad block is not really a good solution either because you can end up annoying your visitors by affecting their viewing experience. The solution is to diversify and look for other ways to monetize such as courses, products, affiliate programs, etc.

Hi Lisa – I enjoyed this post and took a look at your T-shirts. I wonder if you have any sort of affiliate program for those – I have a page on one of my sites that receives many visits from women reverting to natural hair after experiencing damage caused by weaves etc. I’m sure they’d love your shirts. Please do email me if interested 🙂

Thank you Christine! I’m honored. The best thing to do is create a free store yourself and use my designs. Spreadshirt doesn’t have a traditional affiliate program where you can sign up and get paid for link referrals.

So once you setup a store, you can use other people’s designs and you get a 20% royalty on everything sold.

Lisa: Your timing is superb. On my To-Do list for this week is learn about the t-shirt program through amazon. I would have been extremely disappointed once I did the research to find out there is such a long waiting list to get approved. I’m so glad you told us about Spreadshirt. Thank you!!!

Thanks for this post Lisa! Never knew about the Video option. I love Amazon’s Affiliate program as well, last month I made $1000 bucks, not bad at all. You definitely do have to have traffic to be worthwhile, when I first started out I usually only made about $20 or so.

Lisa, I learned a lot! I never pay attention to the spam, err, announcements from my Amazon Associates account, so I missed learning about VideoDirect, Merch and CPM.

As a purely investigative endeavor, I learned about Amazon’s FBA awhile ago. The entire process is fascinating! But, as with anything, I had to rein in my SOS tendencies and stay focused on what I do. (That’s not hard, since I have zero traffic!)

Great overview of the programs Lisa. I love the new style you are using for your intros and outros. But I still missed seeing your beautiful smile in front of the camera 🙂
Amazon really is one of the most trusted brands online, so I’m sharing this one with all my peeps (like always).
Thank you.

“Best” is relative. Not all these methods here are related to ads. In fact, the only one that is about advertising is the CPM program. So are you asking about the programs listed here or AdSense and other ad programs?